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RFM95W-915S2 Development Board - Testing

A project log for 2021 HDP Dream Team: EJA

Learn more about Team EJA's intelligent buoy, and how their solution will help the global fight against ghost gear.

leonardo-wardLeonardo Ward 09/21/2021 at 20:290 Comments

The RFM95W-915S2 Development board is a PCB that contains a RFM95W LoRa transceiver, a U.FL connector for the external antenna, a decoupling capacitor and a group of headers connected to the different pins of the transceiver. The transceiver can be used as a sender or a receiver.

This log describes the initial tests that were performed using the RFM95W-915S2 Development board.

Wiring for the Tests

The webpage randomnerdtutorials.com has an amazing tutorial named ESP32 with LoRa using Arduino IDE – Getting Started, that tutorial contains detailed information about how to use the RFM95 with an ESP32 (the same microcontroller that was selected for our designs). I used the same firmware and connections provided by the tutorial. 

The test requires 2 transceivers, one of them will be used as a sender and the other as a receiver. In this case, one of the transceivers is the  RFM95W-915S2 Development board and the other one is the RFM95W transceiver from Adafruit.

The connections are the following:

ESP32RFM95W-915S2 Development Board
3V33.3V
GNDGND
GPIO 14RST
GPIO 5CS
GPIO 18SCK
GPIO 23MOSI
GPIO 19MISO
ESP32RFM95W Board from Adafruit
3V3VIN
GNDGND
GPIO 14RST
GPIO 5CS
GPIO 18SCK
GPIO 23MOSI
GPIO 19MISO

Firmware

The firmware can be found in the following Github repository. The repository contains a folder named /Firmware/ that contains the project for the transceiver as a receiver and a sender.  

Both of the RFM95W Boards were used as a sender and receiver, the result was successful in both cases. During the test, one of the transceivers sends the package "hello counter", where the counter is a number that goes from 0 to 32767. The other transceiver receives the package and prints the message through serial.

Requisites:

  1. ESP32 Add-on in Arduino IDE
  2. LoRa Library

Results visualized in the serial monitor from the receiver circuit:

For more information about the firmware visit the original tutorial for the RFM95W.

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